2025-05-29 06:58:37
It’s my last day in New York and I’m saying goodbye to a tree.
It’s an American Elm, Ulmus americana, in the park around the corner. I did not know this. I had to look it up. I judged myself a little. I should be more curious! But the truth is that I don’t really care about its name. I just like to hang out with it. I know what it feels like to be near it.
I greet it every morning by pressing my palms against the rough bark.
I rest against my head and back against it.
Things slow down.
I watch the light break through the leaves. For a moment, everything seems to stop. Then the branches move in unison. A silent, secret greeting.
Hello there.
The tree is next to a popular dog run and I am the weirdo leaning against it. But I don’t care what it looks like. I’m just interested in the secrets of the trees.
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. . . . Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
. . . A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.” — Hermann Hesse
A couple of years ago, I went on a road trip upstate with a girl. When we arrived, she walked up to a tree and hugged it. It was a long, heartfelt hug. A hug that left her smiling. I didn’t show it, but I cringed.
What? We’re literally the ‘tree huggers’ now? Give me a break.
Secretly, I was already making friends with the trees. I had spent a week in an outrageously gorgeous valley in the Dolomite Mountains. There, I found a portal, a moment with nature that changed everything. It appeared as one living and breathing web. As a teacher, too. And I was a part of it.
Initially, I resisted. I felt silly, childish. Then, slowly, I embraced this new way of being. I simply could not resist. On every morning walk, I reached out and let my fingertips run across bark. I got to know all the trees in my neighborhood by touch and texture.
I used to give heady advice. Read this and listen to that. Now my advice sounds trivial.
Before doing anything, do what looks a lot like doing nothing.
Sit outside and listen. Meditate. Pray, if you’re the praying kind (I am now). Slowly let the channel open.
Rest against a tree or simply sit near one. Try to make friends with it. Why not send it some gratitude . . . or some love? What if it could hear your thoughts? Maybe it knows things? Maybe it has advice? The trees and rocks, the land on which we walk and dream, they’ve seen it all.
The forces that we can perceive in this richer reality are fundamentally subtle. My life’s work is to help more people understand that these emotional, energetic, non-logical, non-linear and non-verbal signals often come with a high degree of intelligence. — Tom Morgan
an·thro·po·mor·phism [/ˌanTHrəpəˈmôrˌfizəm/], noun, the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object.
There it is. The harsh voice of judgment. Silly boy. Talking to trees. Grow up.
But I no longer care. Between the inner critic and the trees, I know who looks out for me. I know who can teach me how to be.
The tree is deeply rooted. Its branches reach out to receive the light. The trunk connects heaven and earth. That’s how the tree greets the day, the sun, and the wind.
It lives by the rhythm of the seasons. Each spring it sprouts, yet it also lets itself be shaped. It accepts what happens to it and what is in the way — the rocks and the pavement, the droughts, the hail, the gardeners’ saws.
The tree shares: oxygen and perhaps fruit. It offers shelter. It is there to lean against.
When I feel lost, I recall that image, that tree-being: grounded, rooted, and connected. Reaching out, upward. Breathing, receiving light. Listening to the wind, pondering the stars. Sharing what can only be created here, now, by this being, in this way.
That’s how I want to stand: like a channel for life.
Life feels like a paradox: I yearn to stand like a tree, but it is my destiny to walk.
Today is my last day in New York and I will miss my tree,
But not really.
For I know I will find it,
Everywhere and in all trees,
All different,
All perfect.
— Frederik
2025-05-26 02:04:43
A few short years ago, the things that bring me closer to my soul meant nothing to me.
I didn’t dance or sing. I spent little time outside and meditated only sporadically. I didn’t understand the power of silence and sound (I still don’t, not really).
I let my mind be cluttered.
I was always busy. Busy felt good. Rest smelled like laziness. When I made time for my body, it had to be efficient. I needed music or podcasts to keep myself occupied.
Walking and writing were the only things I stuck by pure instinct. Those got me through the COVID years.
I was not curious about my soul.
I made no space for it.
When I gained a glimpse of its strange realms, I got scared. What I saw had nothing to do with the life I was living. Nothing at all. Ze-Ro.
I had to slow down a lot to realize that I was running on autopilot.
I needed distance, space beyond words, to notice that I did not choose when and how much to participate in the infinite ‘happening’. I just woke up and let myself be flooded.
Things are different now.
I used to rely on goals and plans. Now I try to balance thinking and listening. I ground myself in the moment. I notice questions bubble up, float like soft foam on the waves of my consciousness.
Why am I here?
What am I here to do?
What is there to create and to share?
How can I contribute to what is to be done?
I wait.
I wait for the touch of the wind, for a bird to sing, for a whisper. I wait for an answer to form and roll in from the deep.
If nothing happens, I let the mind get to work. I trust that more guidance will be revealed after taking another step.
Then I move.
Soul allows you to become attached to the world, which is kind of love. When the soul stirs, you feel things, both love and anger, and you have strong desires and even fears. You live life fully, instead of skirting it with intellectualism or excessive moralistic worries. — Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
Sometimes my writing journey feels like a series of useful dead-ends. It led me to creativity and art, to spirit and the voice, to the intimate spaces of the soul. Along the way, I tried one label after another. I always reached the same conclusion: not that.
Finance substack. Not that.
Money and meaning. Not that.
Mind-body journaling. Not that.
Help others write. Not that.
I think of writing now as just one aspect of our voice, our sacred and most intimate vibration. A gateway to the space of the soul. Now that is interesting to me.
Why are you here?
What do you care about?
Who are you behind the mask?
Why do you hold yourself back?
What is stuck that wants to move?
What answers do you carry deep inside?
What obvious next step are you avoiding?
What is waiting at the center of your labyrinth?
What golden vision of your life do you not dare look at?
Those are the questions that interest me.
They are fascinating, strange, and challenging.
If they are not, you haven’t scratched the surface. You are walking circles around your maze.
I’ve found these questions to exist in a space of paradox: we carry the answers within. We just don’t have access to the room. We grope in the dark in a jumble of keys. We look for signs in the flickering light of a lonely torch. Answers are revealed one step and one lesson at a time.
Maybe these are the only questions that I can help explore.
Not because I have answers, but because I’ve been there. Because it is the one area in which my mirror feels a tiny bit polished.
2025-05-19 00:44:23
Words used to be my prism and my prison.
I was obsessed with capturing everything. Every experience had to be translated into language.
My old notebooks show how stuck I was, frozen between hope and despair. Pages covered with paper-thin plans and weightless affirmations. I found a thousand ways to ask why am I here, what do I want, and why does this feel so impossible?
I looked for answers in books and podcasts. Always . . . more words.
Writing was my way of moving through life, pen on the page, one page at a time.
It was useful. It was movement.
I can see how the strands of struggle began to weave together, how they formed a checkered shape, a quilt of becoming.
But writing was not enough.
The answers I was looking for were behind doors I could not see.
. . . words that point to the Tao
seem monotonous and without flavor.
When you look for it, there is nothing to see.
When you listen for it, there is nothing to hear.
When you use it, it is inexhaustible.
The things I love look pretty boring.
Close your eyes, repeat a mantra.
Walk in silence.
Sit with a tree.
Lie down and listen to a magician playing an instrument.
Dance your way through a wave of emotions.
Tune into your voice to the sound of a drone.
The things I love point in the same direction: toward the maze, the center, where all things are born.
They direct me away from reading, toward doing.
And they opened doors to the wordless space of the soul.
There, in the formless dark, my mind again forms the big questions.
Why am I here?
What is my lesson to learn?
What is the next step on my journey?
What gifts am I not sharing? Why?
Where am I blocked? How do I hold myself back?
What vision is so bright, I don’t dare look at it?
What is possible in this life?
I don’t reach for the pen. I try to remain with inner stillness. If I am in motion, I ask to let myself be moved. I ground myself in the present, in the weight of the body, in the sounds around me. I wait. I listen.
I look for answers in shapes and sounds, in metaphors and sensations.
What would that sound like?
What would that look like?
What would that feel like?
It feels like an ancient process, like I am discovering a lost birthright.
The word psychotherapy consists of two Greek words: psyche (soul) and therapy (care). By definition, psychotherapy is care of the soul. When you serve your soul, you are being therapeutic in this deep, Platonic sense. — Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
My days have taken on a new rhythm. Slower, quieter. Intense movement embedded in stillness.
It’s not all fun and games and bliss. Far from it. In fact, I am exhausted. My bedroom is filled with boxes and my mind occupied with storage facilities and used cars. I sleep on a simple tri-fold mat, the mattress about to go to the curb.
My experience of time has changed dramatically. Days used to fly by, the hours blurring together. Now they stretch out like songs, an ebb and flow of melodies.
Everything feels both more alive and more . . . mundane.
But boring, I’ve noticed, is fine.
It’s like turning the phone to grayscale. I’ve done it. It works. It works because the phone gets very, very dull. Turn the colors back on and it’s like stepping into Candyland on acid. Way too intense.
Once the artificial stimulus is gone, the ordinary becomes vibrant.
I would love to say that the wordless space has been the best thing to ever happen to me and my writing. But it’s not that simple. There is a price to be paid.
I’m not talking about money. Generally, I’ve found the spaces of caring for the soul not that expensive (though they are often taught in expensive locations, a kind of spiritual White Lotus). No, they asked for a different kind of investment, one I was reluctant to make.
The things I love tend to be embodied and intimate.
They require time, time to explore, discover, and practice.
They ask for undivided attention, for openness, and for active participation.
Am I fully present? Can I face my truth, what is underneath the mask? Can I stay with discomfort? Am I willing to be witnessed?
This feels incompatible with a busy, plugged-in life. Why learn how to swirl like a Sufi when you could be on the couch and catch up on The Last of Us?
And my writing has changed, slowed down.
I used to pick up the scent of a story and follow the trail down a rabbit hole. I could not wait to piece the puzzle together. That’s a valuable skill for an analyst or journalist. It made writing financially rewarding.
Now, deep dive research can feel like an interruption. I read a few pages before bed, a substack post here and there. When people ask for recommendations, I notice how out of the loop I am. I’m the last one to get the news, the one at risk of panicking at the bottom, right before the market turns.
Surrender to the path and maybe the only thing left to write about is that.
It’s not that I’ve turned anti-writing or anti-books. I still love gripping stories and magnificent prose. I know the power of words, see how they ripple through time and shape our world. But I am skeptical that they hold the answers.
I am skeptical that what waits at the center can be put into words.
“Words, symbols, signs, and thoughts and ideas are merely maps of reality,” as Ken Wilber put it. “The word ‘water’ won’t satisfy your thirst.” And I thirst.
What do you do with that thirst when “work” — money, economic activity — has moved behind a wall of screens? I don’t know. Not yet.
But I am learning that the world beyond the map is filled with hidden wells. The water of life is everywhere, like a subtle current within and behind all things.
But the stream runs in secret. It resists being squeezed into words and nailed to the page.
It feels like watching cherry blossoms. An extravagant, abundant explosion of life right now.
Faded by tomorrow.
Wholeness, I think,
Draws its life somewhere where the breathing
Stops,Somewhere where the mind cradles light,
Where the only senses that remainBlush and stumble
If they try to speak with our language so new
It is still trying to
Invent,Still shaping
Its first intelligible sound,
Still sculpting its first true image of
God.— Hafiz
The wordless space feels like the ocean.
One moment calm and gentle, then forceful and wild. Always evocative and mysterious. Always beautiful. Far deeper and stranger than I could have imagined.
I step into the rhythm running through trees and concrete alike.
Afterwards, I watch orange candlelight flicker across the walls of my emptying apartment. The city has sunk into a deep quiet, as if a vast forest was shielding me. Behind closed eyelids I carry fading images and echoes of destiny.
A song rises in flow, fades through the open window.
What appears in motion cannot be held.
Words appear. I know my attempts to translate are hopeless. And yet I write.
I write not because I have answers but in the hope that words are like pebbles, stepping stones for the next person crossing the stream. Stones hinting at what is possible, guiding to the door, to the wordless space.
There, on the threshold of change, we face questions nobody can answer for us.
Do we want to step into the unknown?
Are we going to follow what feels true but cannot be put into words?
Follow the path, climb the stairs, enter the tunnel, plunge into the depths . . . or remain standing, observing, contemplating, analyzing. Be entertained, then move on to another door, another spectacle, another cloud of words.
Walk or watch?
For better or worse, I’ve made my choice. I paid the price. There is no turning back.
I don’t understand what is happening or why. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood. Or maybe I just don’t care anymore. I know something is happening. I try to move with it, swirl at the center of the vortex. That’s plenty already.
The things I love are simple but vast. They have more depth than I could explore in a lifetime.
Walk. Rest against a tree. Close your eyes. Listen. Feel the rhythm. Let yourself be moved.
Move, beloved, move. Trust your feet. They know the next step.
Enter the dance without end.
This is your birthright.
— Frederik
2025-04-29 03:11:37
These are going this week as part of my preparation to move out.
Available for pick-up at 14th St and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan: tomorrow (Tuesday) through Thursday between 3 and 6pm.
IF you are interested: reply to this email or email me directly and let me know what day you would want to stop by. I can send you a picture of the books left that day. Everything is first come first serve.
Max. 4 books per person. You can take more than two if you commit to pass along at least two to someone else within three months. No hoarding :)
I am also selling one extremely rare copy of hedge fund manager Crispin Odey’s investment commentary compilation (“A Short Book And A Long Memory: Investment Commentary 1992-2002”). This is not for sale anywhere that I know of (my guess is that he bought up the remaining copies to take it out of circulation). $80 for in-person pick-up, or $100 + shipping.
That’s it. Have a wonderful week!
Frederik
2025-04-26 17:44:25
Thought is weight, the teacher explains.
I move slowly, arms hanging limp.
Let them dangle as if liquid was dripping out of the fingertips. Those were the instructions. Feel the heaviness.
I’m taking a dance class in SoHo. It’s called Butoh, the Japanese post-war, avant-garde “dance of darkness.” A strange and mesmerizing exploration of weight, space, and mortality that defies definition.
Butoh class confronts me with my desire to escape the discomfort of liminal space. A chapter is closing and I want to move, move on, forward, upward, to clarity and prosperity. Enough already with the confusion and the heaviness. Enough!
I am looking for speed.
Butoh asks about my capacity for patience and presence.
If I let my arm fall, how long does it dangle? How quickly does my body step in, tense up, and suppress the movement? Can I make truly small movements?
How much space do I experience between actions?
How hard is it to just be?
I don’t like to feel lonely. I mean, who does? But what I hate, what gives me the ick, is to admit that I feel that way. Loneliness? That smells like failure, like weakness. It sounds needy and helpless. Eww. No!
I hear two critical voices, an impossible double-bind.
Disgust at my lack of independence: Don’t depend on others for your happiness! Also, disappointment: How are you going to be with the World’s Coolest Woman if you can’t form healthy bonds? Don’t get side-tracked!
My desire for independence is trying to protect me. But you can’t be safe and create. You have to step into the dance. And you have to accept stumbles along the way.
A few weeks ago, I hosted a second online journaling session. Except I found myself alone on the Zoom call. Ooops!
In the back of my mind, I knew the moment contained many lessons. Thursday evening during a turbulent week in markets and politics. Impossible for people overseas while the locals were just trying to get a bit of rest.
But also: was my offering interesting enough? Was I bringing everything I knew to the table? Was I giving my space enough energy?
But that was the level of mind. In my body, I felt crushed.
2025-04-19 01:18:48
I feel exhausted.
I can only imagine how the traders among you feel after the past few weeks.
Following the ups and downs of the market, the news cycle, the gut-wrenching trainwreck of American politics . . . it feels like a privilege to not be immersed in it.
And yet, I feel exhausted.
I’ve picked up Julia Cameron’s morning pages again. Three pages by hand. I write my way through the resistance, through the anguish, the exhaustion. I don’t have time. I don’t want to write. I’m tired. I’m tired. Tired . . .
I move through a thick soup of frustration. A pattern keeps revealing itself. Resistance to motion, fear to anger, anger to sorrow, sorrow to surprise . . . the surprise of words waiting to be spoken.
My place has been a mess.
Boxes of books and journals. Lonely pieces of furniture looking for a new home. A whole life spent holding on to what suddenly lacks any substance.
I’m in liminal space, a foggy in-between, a disorienting passage. A passage to where?
Something died. An era. A persona. A collection of ideas.
I sold the TV. The bookcases. The books are going, too. It’s like hacking away at the rotting stump of a tree long gone.
I can tell who I was from old pictures. But who am I now?
The past is still here, all around me. It claws its way into my dreams. Dreams of trains and mazes. Dreams of people I haven’t seen in decades. Old friends. Girls I will forever remember as teenagers glowing with vibrant youth. Too late. I haste through my dreams. Too late.
The space of the mind feels treacherous. Floors that don’t hold. Rooms filled with questions I can’t answer.
What am I here to do? What is true? What is real? What is coming? What do I want?
I have a hard time with that, with desire. Understanding it, admitting it.
I’m talking about deep desires, strong and heartfelt. Unreasonable. The vivid dreams that reveal our power. I’m talking about what lives so close to the soul, it can barely be put into words.
This space is beyond what others care about or approve of. It’s pure and frightening.
I am talking about the path through the labyrinth, the one toward our gifts. The thread that leads us back will unravel the sweater of reality. There you are. Naked.
Instead of admitting those dreams, I make up a story. I create circumstances that allow me to shift blame. Do what I really want to do without owning it.
It’s not me. It’s the world. I had no choice . . .
I’ve been meeting lots of people and it’s the same exchange over and over.
I am leaving New York. “Where are you going?” I don’t know. Why? It’s too expensive.
But is that true?
Sure, it is expensive and I don’t exactly know where I am going. I call it my surrender experiment. But that’s not the whole story. Can I accept what emerges in liminal space?
Am I just tired of the city, the compromise, the noise, the lack of space? Do I finally understand how it shifts my attention to the short-term, like a company trying to make its quarterly numbers? Can I accept that I want something else?
Do I just want to drift? Wander through nature, beat a drum among trees? What would that say about me? What kind of madness lies hidden in the realm of our power?
“Nothing dies harder than a bad idea,” Julia Cameron writes in the Artist’s Way. “We all know how broke-crazy-promiscuous-unreliable artists are. And if they don't have to be, then what's my excuse? The idea that I could be sane, sober, and creative terrified me, implying, as it did, the possibility of personal accountability. You mean if I have these gifts, I'm supposed to use them? Yes.”
Can we accept our potential, or do we wrap it in an impossible story?
Who would I be without my drama?
I am learning from the liminal space. Every day is a teacher.
What is alive?
The feet already know. They just move across the map. Only the mind wants to know.
Thought after thought after thought after thought afterthought
I am learning to be patient and gentle. To have compassion.
I notice what is alive and what is dead, what flakes off when I touch it. Which pages hold magic, which are just dry paper?
There is a path through the dream. A trail of aliveness.
Motion is beyond story. It is a space of embodied knowledge, of connection and energy. It carries echoes of the eternal.
Old dreams shatter, leaving pieces of glass-stained beauty. Sparks for a new mosaic.
All that is frozen can be released.
All that is stuck can move.
The hardest thing? Letting go of an old story.
The easiest thing? Trust your body. Start walking. Let your feet do the talking.
— Frederik
“Through dancing I discovered that when you put the psyche in motion, it heals itself.” — Gabrielle Roth, founder of 5 Rhythms, maps to ecstasy
YouTube: Can I own my desires?
What desires do I hide from the world? What would I not admit in public? What sounds so outlandish or delusional that I can barely admit that, yes, in fact, I do carry that dream? What is the resistance, the mismatch between who I am and how I want to be seen?
Let’s say you’d like to write in public. You have to face your fears: fear of being exposed, being wrong, being mocked, or being met with indifference.
But you would also have to accept the underlying desire. You want to write and, what, feel seen? You want to be creative? Maybe, god forbid, even be successful or famous? Change the world with your works?
Follow that trail and make a list of your objections. Consult Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way for helpful affirmations. Also, Byron Katie's Loving What Is offers a powerful way to meet negative frozen beliefs.
Elaine: isolation; a trap I’ve struggled with all my life.
“The challenge for me isn’t committing to a practice but the opposite—exercising the discipline to not write so that I can hold space for other sources of joy, meaning, and psychological richness.
The single-minded pursuit of any endeavor, no matter how much it brings us joy or meaning, is a road to loneliness. And that’s not a road I would take again.”
Tom Morgan: There's a Horse Loose in a Hospital; truth-tellers, comedians, and shamans.
The problem is that some spiritual people take themselves FAR too seriously and there’s nothing intrinsically amusing about most of these topics. The point here isn’t to mock spirituality; that’s the easiest of targets. It’s to speak the truths from outside the rationalist-industrial complex: the box that’s kept us mentally imprisoned for decades.
(Also Tom’s two conversations with Brian Whetten, a must-listen for anyone coaching or being coached — thriving as a coach, a playbook for leaders).
Nicolas Michaelsen: What does it mean to be in a Post-Future world?
To live syntropically is to tune oneself to this convergence—to become a vessel through which ancestral wisdom and future possibility meet. It is a way of sensing and shaping reality that honors emergence, pattern, and deep time.
Syntropy speaks of attractors—patterns of coherence, beauty, and aliveness that pull us forward not through plans, but through presence.
It begins by asking a simple question in every context you enter: What feels most alive in me, right now? Then orient toward it, protect it, build from it. That is how the future returns—through our response to what is already calling.
Dave Nadig: Impermanence
When there is no longer any knowledge of the difference between corpse and self, when the broken body on the screen becomes my body, aching with pain, disconnection, rot and decay until neither body remains, only one thing seems to be left: the sense of compassion, wonder and gratitude that humans have tried to label forever: Brahmavihara, Agape & Aloha, Chesed, Buddha-mind, God’s Grace.
All things are indeed impermanent. And yet, somehow, throughout each flicker of reality, each print on the tape, each body in the morgue,
Love seems — if not permanent and undying — insistent.
Jillian Hess: Pablo Picasso's Stunning Repetitions
“Between 1894-1967, Picasso filled 175 sketchbooks. They were so important to him that he inscribed one of the sketchbooks with the words
Je suis le cahier
I am the notebook.”
Finally: Julia Cameron. My memory labeled her the “three pages by hand” lady. Now, years later, I find in her book a wise guide to the spiritual-creative source. It’s all about motion — a morning meditation on the page.
The book is structured as a 12 week course, self-study or as a group. I’m thinking of hosting one or two online circles or groups dedicated to writing and inner work. Leave your name and email if that’s of interest to you.
